Susan Seidelman - Director

Nationality:
American.
Born:
Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 11 December 1952.
Education:
Attended school in Philadelphia; studied design and film at Drexel
University and New York University Graduate School of Film and TV.
Career:
Directed her first feature,

Susan Seidelman

Smithereens
, 1982; began directing episodes of the television series
Sex in the City
, 1998; began directing episodes of the television series
Now and Again
, 1999.
Awards:
Best Short Film (Live Action) Academy Award nomination, for
The Dutch Master
, 1994.
Address:
c/o Michael Shedler, 225 West 34th Street, Suite 1012, New York, NY
10122–0049.
Agent:
William Morris Agency, 151 El Camino Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

Prior to directing
Smithereens
, her breakthrough independent feature, and
Desperately Seeking Susan
, the film that announced her as a major cinematic talent, Susan Seidelman
made
Deficit
, a 40-minute drama about a young man who seeks revenge for a crime
committed against his father. The film was funded in part by the American
Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program. Call it understatement or
prophecy, but a comment on the film's evaluation form portended
Seidelman's future: "The filmmaker shows a budding talent as
a feature film director."

That talent was realized in
Smithereens
and
Desperately Seeking Susan.
Both are likably funky and keenly observed films featuring spirited,
independent-minded but refreshingly unromanticized heroines: refugees from
stifling suburbia who come to New York City's East Village where
they forge identities within a subculture. Both films are knowing
depictions of 1980s New York punk/New Wave/No Wave culture, and are
clearly defined observations of hipness and pseudo-hipness.

Smithereens
, made for $80,000, is a minor landmark in the history of the
then-burgeoning American independent film movement; for one thing, it was
the first such film accepted as an official incompetition entry at the
Cannes Film Festival.
Smithereens
benefits from its low budget, which allows it an authentic feel for time
and place. Its heroine is Wren, a rootless 19-year-old whose motto might
be "Desperately Seeking Celebrity." She lives in a shabby
East Village apartment, from which she is evicted for non-payment of rent;
she may be energetic and determined, but her dreams of achieving fame,
which are connected to the rock music industry and an idealized Southern
California lifestyle, are hazy at best. Instead of educating herself and
working to realize her dreams, Wren pastes photocopies of herself on
subway car and station walls and attempts to link up with a rock singer
whom she foolishly regards as a meal ticket. She will say and do anything
and manipulate anyone, even if the result is her own debasement. Her
rationale for her behavior is a line she repeats throughout the scenario:
"I got a million and one places to go."

Seidelman entered the realm of mainstream filmmaking with her follow-up
feature:
Desperately Seeking Susan
, a stylish screwball comedy that remained faithful to the feeling of its
predecessor and became a surprise box-office smash. In retrospect, it is
one of the more entertaining films of the mid-1980s. There are two
heroines in
Desperately Seeking Susan.
The first is Roberta, a bored suburban housewife who sets out on a comic
odyssey upon becoming intrigued by a series of "Desperately Seeking
Susan" personal ads. Roberta's counterpart, the Susan of the
title, is a variation of Wren. She is a homeless but nonetheless ultra-hip
East Village free spirit who has various boyfriends and sexual liaisons,
and who will think nothing of pilfering jewelry or stiffing a taxi driver.
Roberta and Susan become
immersed in a frantic, funny scenario involving mistaken identity,
amnesia, and other plot devices.
Desperately Seeking Susan
is especially successful in capturing the appeal of Madonna, who plays
the title role and who then was blossoming as one of the era's
elite pop stars. Prior to her playing
Evita
twelve years later, Susan was her preeminent screen role.

Unfortunately,
Desperately Seeking Susan
was to be a career apex for Seidelman; it and
Smithereens
are her foremost films to date. The clever female-oriented humor that
worked so well in
Desperately Seeking Susan
simply is missing from
Making Mr. Right
, which attempts to squeeze laughs out a supposedly successful career
woman's inability to walk in high heels. The scenario (which is set
in Miami Beach) has the heroine realizing she only can find true love with
a robot. In
Smithereens
and
Desperately Seeking Susan
, the male characters run the gamut from boring and self-involved to
sympathetic. In
Making Mr. Right
, the view of men is horribly clichéd and mean-spirited, and
downright offensive in that a real man is insufficient as the
heroine's romantic partner. Furthermore, the robot, which she has
helped program, comes apart whenever it makes love.

In
She-Devil
, Seidelman directed one of the era's most distinguished film
actresses (Meryl Streep) and popular television comediennes (Roseanne),
and worked from an acclaimed feminist novel: Fay Weldon's
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.
But the result, involving a frumpy housewife who seeks revenge after her
husband leaves her, is slight and predictable.
Cookie
, which like
She-Devil
was scripted by Nora Ephron (working with Alice Arlen), is the story of a
cheeky adolescent who forges a relationship with her mafioso father upon
his release from jail. But the film was strictly formulaic, and paled
beside Seidelman's earlier work. In these three films, the feeling
is that Seidelman abandoned her New York artistic roots, and in so doing
lost her way as an idiosyncratic filmmaker.

Seidelman's work in the 1990s at least was considered respectable,
even if it did not establish her as an A-list filmmaker. The luridly named
Confessions of a Suburban Girl
, whose title seems an attempted thematic throwback to
Smithereens
and
Desperately Seeking Susan
, actually is a revealing documentary account of the filmmaker and several
of her friends as they parallel their youthful aspirations to the reality
of their adult lives.
The Dutch Master
, a short film (which earned a Best Live Action Short Oscar nomination),
is the story of a New York dental hygienist who becomes fascinated by, and
begins fantasizing about, a 17th-century painting. As the decade closed,
Seidelman could be found directing for television. Her credits include
episodes of the TV series
Sex in the City
and
Now and Again
, and a pair of very different TV movies:
The Barefoot Executive
, a remake of the 1971 Disney kiddie comedy; and
A Cooler Climate
, a chronicle of the evolving relationship between two disparate
middle-aged women.

If you are, say, Steven Spielberg or Barry Levinson and you choose to
latch onto a television series, that involvement will be viewed as
slumming. Or if you are Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen and you direct a
short, that work will be considered an exercise in creativity. But if you
are Susan Seidelman, and you haven't had a critical or commercial
hit in well over a decade, your TV work and short film, however fine, will
be viewed as a comedown.

Tellingly,
The Dutch Master
was released commercially, along with three other shorts, under the
throwaway title
Tales of Erotica.
It was paired with films by Ken Russell, Melvin Van Peebles, and Bob
Rafelson—who, like Seidelman, are once-innovative filmmakers whose
foremost works most likely are in their past.

—Rob Edelman

User Contributions:

I AM TOM RIJN AND INTERESTED IN FAMILY HISTORY, IN SUSAN'S SMITHEREENS MOVIE I SAW THE NAME OF AN ACTER BRAD RIJN, IS IT POSSIBLE THAT SUSAN KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT HIM AND WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM AFTER 1985 ???